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Status update: 4th Jan ’09

Just a tiny status update about the progress within the last few weeks to bring us into 2009.

I finally realized what was going wrong with a couple of games, we weren’t using 16Kbit EEPROM type saves for certain games that require it. A fix should make its way to the SVN in the next few days for this. Notable games that are now booting thanks to this fix are: Banjo Tooie, ExciteBike 64, Yoshi’s Story.

As for some news on the dynarec front, I coded up a few rough demos and a bug a two was revealed to us from these demos. Also, tehpola has been working hard at debugging the emulator on his PS3 to correct & find solutions to the bugs we’re finding (see article below to see why it’s done on PS3). Every little bit gets us one step closer to the finished recompiler.

Also, the soft graphics plugin has been updated to render the framebuffer through hardware to aid us in debugging (with a faster framerate).

You guys are really doing a great job, and such dedication.. really admirable. I know you guys really can’t estimate a release date yet, but day by day the project is coming closer to the light of day. Hell, I’d be happy with a summer release if it means playing all my old favorites without having to whip the N64 out, clean it up and pray that it still works.

I’m (along with all) am looking forward to this awesome release. Nintendo has been giving Virtual Console the shaft lately, and the future for VC games look very very bleak. Its as if they just selfishly used retro games to make way for seriously crappy WiiWare games, and just dump retro games later on.

But thanks to this wonderful team, we can have our own way to play Roms, and forget about waiting 10 years for 10 more N64 VC releases.

I’m quite certain they’re still working on it. There’s really not much point in posting here unless there’s visible progress, though. And most of the people reading this don’t understand the technical hurdles involved; so they can only measure progress in pictures and videos of the games running, whereas the EmulateMii team measures progress in code development.

There’s really not much point in continuing to post updates that we won’t understand. However, if it puts your mind at ease you can check the change log on their SVN.

Damien and others:
The fact is that we all have lives outside of developing the emulator and we occasionally don’t have time or energy to constantly be working on the emulator. Please be patient as we are making significant progress, but it takes time since we have other things which must take priority over this development.

Logan Rehard:
There’s no magical switch which is going to give us full speed: it will take a lot of time and effort for us to make all the optimizations to run games at full speed. We will make it very clear when we’ve achieved full speed emulation so there’s no need to ask.

These guys have others lives, they probably need to do other work that pays the bills Be thankful for there work. However I get the impression that they won’t release a binary build until they believe it’s perfect, which will probably never happen. They have a block of code that works, they believe they can make it better and recode it, this cycle continues without ever releasing a binary build. They eventually loose interest, or something else happens in there lives, the code becomes abandon, and no else picks up on the code. This project is starting to remind of Enlightenment.org E17. Don’t hold your breath for a release, it’s going to be a year soon since the last binary build. I would recommend that they release a binary on some sort of milestone basis, like the Wine project, or Mozilla Milestone series before it became stable.

Mia1dolfan,well said.
We don’t expect their release to be perfect from the get go.It is much better to release the emulator and revise it with future updates and also to release the source code for other people to help and actually speed up the process.